At TranslateMedia, we always advise clients to avoid the use of machine translation for their professional, client-facing communications such as their advertising campaigns, websites or brochures. While machine translation tools are excellent for those of us who are unable to speak a certain language and need to get the gist of a sentence or paragraph of text – they should only ever be used without being post-edited by a translator.

The translations returned from many machine translation systems (such as BabelFish, Google Translate or Bing Translator) have caused huge embarrassment for companies in the past, but no one at TranslateMedia has ever seen a machine translation quite as funny as this:

Elisabeth Lang, a writer for eTN, claims to have came across a brochure for a hotel in Beijing that was translated from Mandarin to English using machine translation – with hilarious results.

Extract from the Beijing Hotel Brochure

Getting There:

Our representative will make you wait at the airport. The bus to the hotel runs along the lake shore. Soon you will feel pleasure in passing water. You will know that you are getting near the hotel, because you will go round the bend. The manager will await you in the entrance hall. He always tries to have intercourse with all new guests.

The Hotel:

This is a family hotel, so children are very welcome. We of course are always pleased to accept adultery. Highly skilled nurses are available in the evenings to put down your children. Guests are invited to conjugate in the bar and expose themselves to others. But please note that ladies are not allowed to have babies in the bar. We organise social games, so no guest is ever left alone to play with them self.

The Restaurant:

Our menus have been carefully chosen to be ordinary and unexciting. At dinner, our quartet will circulate from table to table, and fiddle with you.

Your Room:

Every room has excellent facilities for your private parts. In winter, every room is on heat. Each room has a balcony offering views of outstanding obscenity! .. You will not be disturbed by traffic noise, since the road between the hotel and the lake is used only by pederasts.

Bed:

Your bed has been made in accordance with local tradition. If you have any other ideas please ring for the chambermaid. Please take advantage of her. She will be very pleased to squash your shirts, blouses and underwear. If asked, she will also squeeze your trousers.

Above All:

When you leave us at the end of your holiday, you will have no hope. You will struggle to forget it.

The hotel’s English speaking guests will certainly struggle to forget this hotel but for all the wrong reasons. Poor translation makes businesses look unprofessional, lazy and cheap. If you’re a luxury hotel, it makes no sense to try and save money on your marketing material by using machine translation as it will destroy your brand’s image and harm sales.

Have you got marketing material that requires translation by professional translators? If so, get in touch with us for a no-obligation quote.